Milpitas seeks resident input for city’s next budget

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On Monday, Jan. 22, 2018, a group of Milpitas residents outline their budget priorities with the help of Steve Toler, right, of Management Partners, a firm the city has contracted for community input on its budget.
Photo by Henri Gendreau

For one evening earlier this week, a small group of Milpitans were able to play City Council, doling out a cool (and fake) million dollars to areas of importance in the community of their choosing.

The workshop was part of the city’s effort to engage community members in the process of making the city’s annual budget, which staff expects to bring before council in April or May. It’s the first time in recent memory Milpitas has made a particular outreach to the public for input into its budget. The city held sessions Monday night and Tuesday morning.

“We really like these small round table discussions, because you can think through issues together, and maybe provide some additional input that will be helpful to the council,” said Greg Larson, a consultant with Management Partners, which is leading the city’s community budget-making process.

As of this week, the firm has gathered nearly 500 online surveys from residents and 150 responses from city employees. In analyzing those inputs, the firm identified community values it distilled to six broad themes: cultural and ethnic diversity; family focus; economic opportunity; transportation accessibility; safe and peaceful; and responsibility.

City staff and consultants guided the five women and eight men — divided in three groups — through different exercises. Those involved discussing in their groups which community values were most important, explaining to the gathering as a whole which they identified, and later earmarking a million-dollar budget to various buckets labeled “environment,” “public safety,” “fiscal responsibility” and the like.

Steve Toler of Management Partners outlined the results of the community surveys.

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“Folks indicated strongly a desire for a safe and peaceful existence here in Milpitas, whether that translates into police and fire responses, the overall quiet feeling of neighborhoods as well as really having a strong connection with one another,” he said.

A disparity did emerge, however, between community surveys and city employee surveys when it came to what general area the city should focus on.

Initial community survey results ranked “community wellness and open space” as number one, followed by “public safety” and “transportation and transit.” Employee surveys ranked public safety first, followed by “infrastructure and community facilities maintenance” and “economic development and job growth.” Community wellness and open space ranked sixth or seventh (slides from the consultants did not specify which).

The evening saw rousing conversations among residents about worsening traffic, a perceived increase in burglaries, aging utilities infrastructure and a lack of affordable housing.

Jennifer Moore, 59, who is retired, said she never considered herself a politically active person. But the 45th president changed her mind, so she showed up.

“I’ve lived here 34 years and never done a damn thing for the city,” Moore said. “But watching Trump get elected when a majority of the people in the country did not want it, made me pay attention to the fact that if we had been more active at the city level, at the county level, at the state level, and so forth, that that might not have happened, so goddamn it, it means that now I have to get out and do shit that I have almost really zero interest in doing.”

So if Moore can show up to a community budget workshop, you have no excuse not to be civically engaged, too. Seriously, though, Moore says she has also seen the effects of crumbling sewer and water lines in her neighborhood, so the opportunity to discuss where tax dollars should go was appealing.

“I want to know how we actually spend our money,” Van Lan Truong, a policy aide in the Santa Clara County supervisors office, said. “It helps you to see a bigger picture, that you see the need to take everything into consideration.”

Her main priorities are to see more affordable living and community engagement. She also mentioned a desire for a central shopping complex.

“We want a Santana Row for Milpitas,” she said, referring to the retail and residential district in San Jose.

Management Partners will take the results of its surveys, community input workshops and interviews to council, which has scheduled it at its budget workshop for Feb. 3.

Last year, the council adopted a total city budget of $195.2 million for the 2017-18 fiscal year, which ends on June 30.

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